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Speaking to Cameron McCormack: Go to the source, you'll find awesome people there

Brad–Friday, 27 June 2014

Yesterday (26 June, 2014) the Net Engine office was lucky enough to have a chat to Cameron McCormack, @heycam. A developer at Mozilla, implementor of / contributor to the SVG spec, and all round rad guy. We were pretty stoked that he had the time to spend with us.

Browsers are extremely complex. It’s difficult to stay abreast of the capabilities, features and workings of these swiftly changing platforms. It was a massive boon to be able to “go to the source” and speak with Cam.

We sat down with a few beers and, firstly, went through how central Firefox was to our latest product Outfit. It was an opportunity to say thank you, hear news about new features under development and learn about performance gotchas / optimisations for browser rendering. We even got to put a direct up-vote in for SVG text-flow implementation, which was pretty cool.

We got to talking about new blend mode implementations: background-blend-mode (available in latest Firefox and Chrome) and mix-blend-mode (available in Firefox with feature enabled from about:config). Mix blend mode is insanely cool, I can’t wait for the standard to be implemented in more browsers. The gap between native and browser graphics capabilities is becoming very very narrow.

We also got to talk about the relationship between Cairo, Gecko and Firefox. We found out that a Cairo backend is likely still responsible for the translation of CSS / HTML for print (Find out more here). The more you know!

Thanks so much to Andy for organising and kicking off the conversation, thanks again to Cam for being so open and keen to chat. A great afternoon.